OpenGL is too complicated for me, is there an alternative?

Question

I read the famous “Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming” to the head of the hierarchy, but for me it is too difficult, or at least too long to study (I have to make a project to create a 3D landscape in which the camera can move + lighting effects + objects). I used gltut java translation and I still need to execute my project in java.

So, the question is: is there any engine a little easier to use for beginners in which we can easily visualize scenes, but not an engine where a simple makeScene () will do all the work?

I heard about jmonkeyengine, is this a good alternative?

Answer 1

I love your ambition, OpenGL is a very low starting point these days.

The jMonkeyEngine you are talking about is probably a good way to get started. This will help you with bulk code loading.

One important thing in the case of a game / 3d programming is that even if you have a high-level mechanism, you may want to make some animations, some shaders, etc., requiring detailed knowledge in the rendering pipeline, detailed knowledge about the vector math and those things. You cannot get around this, but I suggest you “take” open source.

Answer 2

You may be interested in Java3D . With it, you can build scene graphs from objects, light sources, etc. Its object-oriented approach may be simpler than the lower-level procedural approach when writing OpenGL directly, although the latter may be more powerful.

Answer 3

Then you can try Ogre4j, which is a project that you can use to access the Ogre libraries (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) in Java applications.